I've picked up some heat from my previous tweet saying it makes no sense that the Humans are aligned with the Batarians. Everyone saying "It's been 600 years opinions can change" doesn't understand the full scope of why Humans aligning with the Batarians as a 2nd Clique makes no sense, and this isn't even a "Batarians icky" kind of deal. There simply wouldn't be any Batarians left to ally with, and if you'll indulge me, I'll explain why below. Short version: Batarians are straight fucked. Demographically, culturally, logistically fucked. We're talking 'six ways to Sunday' kind of fucked with no easy way out. There's very little chance of them making a rebound even in 600 years. Long version: Let's start with what we've seen and what we've been told in ME3 The Batarian core territories are right fucked. Most people only grasp this in vague terms. Yes, it's understood that the Batarians took the brunt of the Reapers' first strike with practically zero prep time, but it's far, far worse than that. Harvested Batarians were the backbone of the early Reaper war, and Cannibals remained a large bulk of encountered enemies up until the end. If we take the rough ratio of enemies encountered throughout ME3 as representative of the larger war effort, then Cannibals made up between 1/4th to 1/3rd of the entire Reaper frontline force ACROSS THE GALAXY. To do that in a galactic-scale war would require an incomprehensible amount of Batarians to be harvested, and this doesn't yet include the Batarians being harvested as biomass to create new Reapers. The bulk of those Batarians would be coming from Batarian Space. The non-human Reaper forces you face on Earth during Operation Hammer were probably harvested from the Citadel, which means even the Batarian refugees that hunkered down there were fucked too. So, what does that leave the Batarians to work with as a species? Well, to be frank, not much. Of the surviving Batarian population, most would be from the Batarian diaspora living in the surviving independent colonies and stations across the Terminus (a disproportionate number of which would be male mercenaries, pirates, and slavers). The surviving military forces would be a minority (and probably 100% male, let's be real), while the last minority group would be survivors from the home territories. It's unlikely the Citadel refugees made it out of the station before being liquidated. The most generous estimates would put them in the tens of millions, an insane drop from pre-war numbers of around 10-ish billion (15 if you want to believe Hegemony propaganda). So, to properly rebuild, the Batarians would have to: 1) Deal with a gender imbalance so insane, it makes the looming crisis in China today look tame. 2) Deal with the fact that all their infrastructure was vaporized by the Reapers. 3) Deal with the fact that a large proportion of their survivors are outlaws. 4) Survive long enough that the other races can sort out enough of their own shit to redirect resources to Batarian space. 5) Not devolve into 20th-century Chinese Warlordism. Even if they manage to get over all of those hurdles (which, let's be honest, is doubtful), best-case scenario, the Batarians would basically live in little reservations, like the Native American tribes of today. Worst-case scenario is they go extinct.